Saturday, 16 June 2018

The boat ride today was much better than it was last Wednesday.  The seas were calmer, or perhaps the boat was heavier because it had a full load of people … for whatever reason, nobody got sick this time.  (With weekend traffic, the boat was at full capacity. Wednesday it was only about 1/4 full.)  The lines for immigration to get back into Hong Kong were a lot longer, too, but I was so relieved to have the ferry ride safely behind me that standing in line felt like a treat.

This time, we rented an Airbnb on HK Island.  Most Airbnb rentals have a 3-night minimum, so we ended up in a very fancy place up on the hill, one of the few places willing to rent for only two nights.

This is the most expensive real estate in the world.  As far as we can tell from snooping around the apartment, it’s likely corporate-owned and occupied only part-time by an Irish business man.  He has family photos scattered around, but only men’s clothing and a bunch of business magazines are here.  In his family pictures there are three young children, but no sign in the apartment that a child has ever set foot here.

This apartment also has a live-in maid, Luceilma, which we did not know when we rented the house. The owner told us in an email after we’d booked it.  When we saw all the Filipino maids hanging out on the streets last Sunday, we had no idea we’d end up having a personal experience with one of them.

The apartment is large by Hong Kong standards.  It has three bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a big living room/dining area.  There is plenty of space here for us to spread out. (And yet Holden and Josie are clumped together like horses in a field.)

Isabella and Josie’s room.  They each get their own bed!

The master bedroom.

The sitting area in the master bedroom.  The views from this room are amazing, and even more impressive at night.

Then on to the kitchen, the domain of the “helpers” (as the maids are called here.) It’s small and cramped, but well-appointed.  It would be hard to prepare a large family meal because there is very little prep space, but other than that it has everything you’d need.

The laundry room/maid’s room.  When she was showing us around the apartment, we asked where she lived and she showed us this room.  We thought we’d misunderstood because earlier we mentioned that we desperately needed to do a bunch of laundry.  We figured she was showing us the laundry facilities because we’d asked about them. When she left the apartment for the afternoon, I got in there to use the washing machine and realised that she does, in fact, live in that teeny tiny room, sleeping in a bunk bed across from the washer and dryer.  The door in the back leads to a very, very small bathroom.

I feel weird about this.  For one thing, in order to do laundry I have to go into her private space, and that feels like a violation.  She has so little space to begin with, and now she has to put up with strangers using it?  But we are desperate for clean clothes … it’s just so hot here and everything we own stinks of sweat.  We haven’t had access to a washing machine since we left home 11 days ago; we’ve rinsed a few things out in bathroom sinks (using shampoo or dish soap), but that’s a poor substitute for a real laundering. So, into the laundry room I went.

The washing machine took a long time to run through a cycle.  I put the clothes into the dryer while Luceilma was still out, but by the time they were dry, I think she was back in her room.  The door was shut and I didn’t want to disturb her.  She also offered to cook us breakfast on Sunday morning — her one day off — and we told her she didn’t need to. When she leaves for the day Sunday, I can get in there and do the rest of our washing.  I don’t want her to feel like she needs to do it for us on her day off.

Considering the circumstances, I read up a lot more on the Filipino domestic workers.  Here is an interesting post by a lady who went out and interviewed some of these women. An excerpt:

These ‘helpers’ (the common term for domestic laborers in Hong Kong) are expected to work twenty four hours a day, six days a week, but government regulations dictate they must be given twelve consecutive hours of free time each Sunday. Since the women cannot afford to go to movies or eat in restaurants on their day off, they gather in Hong Kong’s train stations and parks or outside public buildings.

I discover some of the women in the group have been here for as little as four months while others have lived in Hong Kong for as long as twelve years. Most have young children at home and are university educated. They are nurses, teachers, physiotherapists, pharmacists, computer programmers and business women. They speak several languages. However they can make three times more money in Hong Kong (the government dictated salary is about $600 US a month) than they can practicing their professions in the Philippines. They tell me they need money to pay for their children’s education. “To give our kids hope for the future”, one woman says. They all send a substantial portion of their salary home to their families.

A view (below) from our apartment windows.

New construction across the street.  It’s anachronistic to see such a modern building completely surrounded by primitive-looking bamboo scaffolding.

Walking around our neighborhood to find a place for lunch.  They tell it like it is here.

Pricing on some available properties.

We found a Szechwan dim sum restaurant for lunch (photo of Holden below).  The building also had a grocery store on the lower level so we were able to kill two birds with one stone.

The grocery store has fancy imported cheese!

View from the master bedroom of our apartment after dark.

Sunday, 17 June 2018

Adam: Today was a transition day for us … just one free Sunday to take care of chores (laundry, organizing bags, finding things that keep getting lost but somehow carried amongst the 5 of us.)

We head back to the airport tomorrow, so I spent a good part of the morning figuring out how to get there, what to do when we’re there, what we’re going to do once we land in Seoul & etc. My total knowledge of Korean is one word – and only because we were fans of the show Arrested Development. “Annyong!” It’s an inside joke; I do need to get a couple more words down to keep the whole “pointing and grunting” routine with any human interaction down as infrequently as possible.

Side note from Brenda:  Adam usually spends several months in advance studying the language of the places we visit so that he can communicate basic things when we get there.  On this trip, our itinerary is more loosey-goosey and we didn’t know we were going to Korea until we got here and found cheap airline tickets from HK to Seoul.  It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.  (Our trouble in Macau stemmed from the fact he thought they would speak more Portuguese than they did.  In the end, we got by well enough in English.)

When we woke up today, all our laundry from yesterday evening was neatly folded in the front room.  Luceilma noticed our now half-full bag of remaining dirty clothes and offered to wash them for us today, too.  I declined, saying “Oh no, I can do them.  You shouldn’t have to work on your day off. You should go enjoy yourself!”  She said, “I don’t mind!” and took the clothes.  I didn’t insist on doing it myself because I thought maybe she’d rather do laundry on her day off than have me (a total stranger) poking around in her room.  That’s certainly how I would feel.

Some of the cars parked at our building:  Rolls Royce, BMW, Mercedes, and (not pictured) several Porsches and at least two Ferraris.  Most of them have a layer of dust and clearly aren’t driven often.

Walking down the hill to the train station.  We’re headed to the Kowloon side to visit the bird and flower markets. Hong Kong Island is steep everywhere. Any north-south movements require stairs. Fun going north, punishing going south. East and west is relatively flat. Why don’t pictures ever adequately show slope? The photo below looks level, but it was straight down.

Beautiful park.

Bella headed into the fountain.  Note the couple watching her in the background.  I didn’t want her to go in there but all three kids insisted those steps were for walking and the bench inside was for sitting, even though it was wet.

Ta da!

The Mong Kok Flower Market.  I’ve never seen so many exotic plants in one place.  Josie and I were beside ourselves trying to take it all in.  A lot of the plants had identification tags in English and we were making mental notes on species, arrangement techniques, bonsai styles, growing mediums, etc.  We were giddy! It was a riot of beautiful color and no city street in the world smells as lovely as this one.

When we got back to the apartment later, I found out that Adam only had four pictures of the whole place (and two of them didn’t turn out).  I couldn’t believe it.  How could he pass up such a magnificent photo opportunity?  At the time, I assumed he was taking pictures left and right.  If we see a fancy parked car, we have 50 pictures to choose from.  Different interests, indeed!!

A little further down the street you come to the Yuen Po Street Bird Market. This was what I really came here to see … the magnificence of the flower market was just a lovely surprise.

In addition to vendors selling birds and bird-related items, local people take their pet birds for “walks” in the park.  It’s a chance for the birds to get some fresh air and sunshine, and for the owners to sit around B.S-ing and playing mahjong.  We didn’t see a single bird owner that wasn’t an old man.   Our friend Randy likes to say that every town has a Dead Pecker Corner; a place where local old men gather to sit, drink coffee, and not talk to each other. In Hong Kong, the bird market appears to be it.

I am so excited to be here!  Judging from Holden’s body language, he is less enthusiastic.

One of the vendors.

Group of men “walking” their birds.

The birds get to socialise, too.  They chirp and sing like mad, eyeing each other and dancing about in their cages.

Amazon parrots (and three cockatoos in the background) all getting baths.  Parrots LOVE bath time. Watching them today made me miss my own birds.

Live crickets.  The vast majority of birds here are little songbirds and most of them are insectivores.

Lovebird and parakeet booth.

The selling side of the street. (Holden in red plaid shirt.)

Each bird cage is equipped with these little ceramic dishes.  The come in sizes ranging from thimble to tea cup and some of them are really pretty.  I bought a pair of hand-painted cups as a souvenir/artwork.

One last view of the tail-end of the flower street as we leave the bird market.

One of the things the kids like to do when we visit places is try local desserts.  This time it’s “Sawdust Pudding” (木槺布甸); vanilla pudding with powdered cookie layered in it. It was a little dry.

The things in the lower right corner are dried animal penises.  From left to right: sheep, deer, seal.  Two other trays contain dried sea horses.  We used Adam’s phone app translator to read all of these, with the kids screeching out in disgust as each item’s identification was revealed.

According to this blog post on Chinese medicine and healing foods:

Sea horses should be slowly boiled in a soup and this is good for the kidneys. Anything good for the kidneys are also good for the sexual organs according to my Chinese colleague.

Speaking of “sex-drugs”, we have to mention the famous seal’s penis (with balls) and deer’s penis. When we pointed at the seal’s penises and asked what they were, the owner called it seal’s kidney.  My colleague doubted it and so we checked our Introduction to Chinese Medicine 101, and learnt that seal’s penis is nicknamed seal’s kidney.  The terminology really explains how closely the well-being of kidney and sex are related.  Both seal’s penis and deer’s penis can be sliced for making soup or soaked in liquor for drinking. We asked the owner which one is better and he answered “Look at the size and you can tell”. We compared the sizes and learnt that the bigger the merrier (for the seller).

Whatever the case, these things don’t come cheap.  The sheep penises are HK$3,080, while the deer penises are HK$570.  The seal penises are a whopping HK$4,150.  (In today’s exchange rate, that is roughly US$392 for sheep, $72 for deer, and $528 for seal.) We don’t know if that is per each, or per gram.

On to lunch: nothing fancy.

Maid’s day off in the metro station. The Muslims are mostly from Indonesia and Malaysia.  Most maids in Hong Kong are from the Philippines (including Luceilma) and are predominantly Catholic.

This afternoon we spent a couple of hours relaxing in our apartment before going out to see the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens.  Isabella opted to stay in and have some “me” time.

Below:  the Peak Tram going up the mountain. This is the same one we rode on our first day here.

Fountain in the zoological park.  Hong Kong has very lovely green spaces tucked in amongst the high-rise buildings and cityscape.

The zoological park has a huge section full of aviaries and a different area with mammals — mostly monkeys. They have a really nice facility here but the mesh on the cages is a very tight weave that doesn’t make for good photos.

Holden: hot, tired and ready to go back to the apartment.

Tomorrow we fly to Seoul, South Korea.